Posts Tagged ‘auction’

The auction sale of an illustrated Haggadah manuscript dating back to 1726 is expected to bring in as much as $1.5 million, the London Independent reported Tuesday. An auctioneer discovered it in an Osem soup carton in the garage at a house in Manchester where he was carrying out a routine evaluation for the relatives of the owner of the property.

The manuscript contains more than 50 colored scenes from the Torah. Experts think that it was commissioned in Vienna to mark the first child of a member of the Oppenheimer baking family.

The latest owners of the Haggadah smuggled it out of Belgium in 1940 before the Nazis invaded the country.

Dr. Yaakov Wise, of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester, told the British newspaper, “It is very, very lucky that it survived from that period. It is a miracle that it was not thrown out, that it was found and someone realized what it was. I would call it divine providence….

“This was probably in use for 200 years. There are wine and food stains on it which is exactly what you would expect when it was at the table.”

A list of names of 801 Jews rescued by German industrialist Oskar Schindler went on the auction block on eBay, with a starting price of $3 million.

The 14 pages containing the original Schindler’s List were auctioned off by California collectors Gary Zimet and Eric Gazin, who are hoping to sell it for $5 million. So far, there are no takers, and bidders have until July 28 to stake their claim.

The date April 18, 1945 is written in pencil on the first page. Only male names appear on the German-language list, as well as each person’s date of birth and profession.

The list was named for Oskar Schindler, a German businessman credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis by deeming them essential workers for his enamel works factories.

His story reached worldwide attention after the release of the 1993 feature film “Schindler’s List.” Directed by Steven Spielberg, the movie was based on the Booker Prize-winning novel “Schindler’s Ark,” which Australian novelist Thomas Keneally published in 1982.

Of the seven original versions of the list, only four are known to still exist — including two at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum, and one at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The sellers said the copy being offered for sale on eBay is located in Israel, according to the paper.

“It is extremely rare that a document of this historical significance is put on the market,” Zimet said. “Many of the survivors on this list and their descendants moved to the United States, and there are names on this list which will sound very familiar to New Yorkers.”

A letter handwritten by Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish soldier who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, was sold at auction for nearly half a million dollars.

The letter, which Dreyfus sent from prison to government officials in an attempt to clear his name, was sold Wednesday for $492,000 at an auction organized by Sotheby’s Paris branch. It was not expected to bring in more than $190,000, according to the French news agency AFP.

Due to Sotheby’s privacy policy, French media did not report the names of the seller or the buyer, but the buyer reportedly participated in the auction over the phone, outbidding several interested parties.

AFP reported that Dreyfus’ grandson, Charles Dreyfus, wrote an open letter this week urging the seller not to sell but to give the letter to a museum.

The letter was “probably given by Pierre Dreyfus, the son of Alfred, to the national French library for safekeeping on May 1940 so that they may protect it from the German occupation,” Sotheby’s said. “The letter was then returned to the Dreyfus family in 1951 and bought” by the person who sold it at Sotheby’s in 1996, the news agency reported.

A captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated in 1906 of his conviction on charges of spying for Germany after a lengthy court battle rife with anti-Semitic overtones, which historians describe as a determinant of modern Zionism and a major influence on Theodore Herzl – an Austrian journalist who covered the trial and later founded the World Zionist Congress.

The case was widely denounced as a miscarriage of justice, most notably in “J’accuse,” an open letter by Emile Zola published in 1898 on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore.

A Marc Chagall work from 1981, “Bouquet in a Green Vase”, was sold at the Tel Aviv Hilton for $314,000 in an auction that was held simultaneously in several countries, Globes reported Monday.

The Matsart auction house brought more than $800,000 in the sales, which included a 1959 work by Mané Katz, “Four Musicians”, that was sold for $206,500, and an untitled work from 1982 by Yaakov Agam, sold for $170,000.was established by the collaboration between the sales points and the auction house’s sophisticated technology that made it possible to hold simultaneous auctions.